AAS Meeting #193 - Austin, Texas, January 1999
Session 97. Extra-Solar Planets and the Search for Life
Display, Saturday, January 9, 1999, 9:20am-4:00pm, Exhibit Hall 1

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[97.10] Active SETI : Targets Selection and Message Conception

Y. Dutil, S. Dumas (Centre de Recherche de la Défense Valcartier)

By opposition to passive SETI, which wants to detect extra-terrestrial civilizations, the goal of active SETI is to establish a communication link with those civilizations. Already difficult, this task is complicated by the lack of knowledge about the nearest civilization. Even worst, since resources available are even more limited than for passive SETI, targets selection is critical. We will show, that at radio-wavelength, early efforts may be concentrated in a small regions of the sky.

Technical and astrophysical considerations severely limit the communication bandwidth for radio waves. Careful design of the message is needed in order to facilitate its detection and decoding. We will described the solutions we have implemented in the scope of the Encounter 2001 project.


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